Checkmate to Murder: A Second World War Mystery Read online

  Introduction © 2021 by Martin Edwards

  Copyright © 1944 by The Estate of E. C. R. Lorac

  Cover and internal design © 2021 by Sourcebooks

  Cover image © The British Library Board

  Sourcebooks, Poisoned Pen Press, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Published by Poisoned Pen Press, an imprint of Sourcebooks, in association with the British Library

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

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  Originally published as Checkmate to Murder in 1944 in London, England, by Collins.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Lorac, E. C. R., author.

  Title: Checkmate to murder / E.C.R. Lorac.

  Description: Naperville, Illinois : Poisoned Pen Press, [2021] | Series: British library crime classics

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020036131 (trade paperback) | (epub)

  Subjects: GSAFD: Mystery fiction.

  Classification: LCC PR6035.I9 C48 2021 (print) | DDC 823/.912--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020036131

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Back Cover

  Introduction

  Checkmate to Murder was published in 1944, when E. C. R. Lorac was at the peak of her powers. This domestic murder puzzle captures the febrile atmosphere of wartime, a period of British history when blackouts, fire-watching, and air raid precautions were an everyday fact of life.

  The story opens on a foggy evening in London. A group of people are to be found in or around the large Hampstead studio of artist Bruce Manaton. At one end of the fifty-foot-long room, Manaton is painting the portrait of an actor, André Delaunier, who is resplendent in the scarlet robes of a cardinal. At the far end, two men are hunched over a game of chess. They are Robert Cavenish and Ian Mackellon, both of whom are highly respectable individuals who work for the government. Rosanne Manaton, sister of Bruce and also an artist, who is cooking supper in the adjoining kitchen, occasionally pops in to the studio. A cleaning lady, Mrs Tubbs, is also bustling about the place. Everything seems calm, but this peaceful scene is about to be interrupted by murder, and before the end of the story the lives of several of those present will be changed forever.

  Suddenly a special constable bursts in on the gathering. He tells Manaton and the others that he has chanced upon a body in the next door building. The dead man is called Folliner; he was a miser and his money has gone missing. Verraby, the special constable, believes he has already caught the murderer—a young Canadian soldier who is a great-nephew of the victim and who made a run for it when he was about to be arrested. When Verraby hands the culprit over to the official police of Scotland Yard, it seems that he has presented them with an open-and-shut case.

  Lorac’s series investigator, Detective Chief Inspector Macdonald, nevertheless suspects that all may not be as it seems. Macdonald is shrewd and compassionate, but also relentless. As he and his team delve deeper, they uncover a tangle of potential motives. Even the behaviour of the special constable is open to serious question—is his dabbling in property speculation a clue to the crime? And what really did happen to the old man’s money?

  The war-time setting and atmosphere are integral to the mystery. As Bruce Manaton says, “Londoners have heard so many bangs during their recent history, that a pistol shot isn’t so impressive a row as it used to be.” Macdonald agrees: “I suppose all Londoners who survived the winter of 1940 with nerves unimpaired, did develop what the psychologists call a ‘defence mechanism’—they learned to disregard disessential bangs.”

  Today, more than three-quarters of a century later, it is fascinating to read an account of a domestic crime committed at a time of national crisis. A minor character called Miss Stanton expresses the prevailing mood: “Bombs I can disregard—we’re all in it together—but crime and corruption and disreputability—it’s too much.”

  Caroline Rivett, who wrote both as E. C. R. Lorac and as Carol Carnac, was herself a Londoner. Born in Hendon in 1894, she attended the South Hampstead High School and the London School of Arts and Crafts. She published her first detective novel in 1931; this was The Murder on the Burrows, a well-crafted debut which launched Macdonald on a career that was to last for more than a quarter of a century.

  Nine Lorac novels were published by Sampson Low, earning increasingly favourable reviews, before she moved to the more prestigious imprint of Collins Crime Club in 1936, with Crime Counter Crime, set during a General Election. She remained a Crime Club stalwart for the rest of her life. John Curran, historian of the Crime Club, argues that she was especially well served by the designers of the cover artwork for her books, and this is no doubt one of the factors that has made her work especially collectible. First editions in the attractive dust jackets of the period can now change hands—on the rare occasions when they come on to the market—for thousands of pounds.

  She was equally at home with urban and rural settings. Her early books include Murder in St John’s Wood and Murder in Chelsea, while two other books set in London, Bats in the Belfry and the war-time mystery Murder by Matchlight, have already been published in the British Library’s Crime Classics series and by Poisoned Pen Press in the U.S. Like Rosanne Manaton, she was artistic and had an interest in ski-ing; the winter sport plays a central part in her Carol Carnac novel Crossed Skis, also published by the British Library and Poisoned Pen Press.

  In November 1940, having been evacuated to Devon, she wrote to a friend about the horrors of living through a war. Referring to the death of one of her oldest friends, killed while fire-fighting, she said: “Most of my other friends have been bombed or burnt out of their homes. What a sickening insanity it all is.”

  By the time Checkmate to Murder was published, she had moved up north, to Aughton in Lancashire, to be near her sister, Maud, and brother-in-law, John Howson. They are all now buried in the graveyard at Aughton church, along with a third sister, Gladys. In the years before her death in 1958, Carol Rivett became a popular figure in the village while continuing to work productively as a detective novelist. To this day, she is remembered in the local community as spirited and strong-willed, a woman with a strong social conscience. Macdonald, a quiet but utterly single-minded detective, embodies both her determination and her humanity.

  Martin Edwards

  martinedwardsbooks.com

  Chapter One

  I

>   The vast studio had two focus-points of light; between these pools of radiance was a stretch of shadows, colourless, formless, empty. At one end of the long, barn-like structure, where the light was most strongly concentrated, was a model’s platform. A high-backed Spanish chair stood upon it, with a dark leather screen as background. On the chair sat a man arrayed in the superb scarlet of a Cardinal’s robe, the broad-brimmed Cardinal’s hat upon his head.

  The lights were so arranged that they illumined the pale haughty face of the sitter, his challenging black eyes and beetling brows. Beneath his square powerful chin was a triangle of ecclesiastical purple—magenta described it more truly. His sleeves were lined and edged with cerise silk—a gorgeous clash of colour discord contrasting with the heraldic scarlet of the frock. One powerful white hand gripped the arm of his chair: the other hand rested on the jewelled cross on his breast.

  Opposite to the sitter, at a distance of some ten feet, a painter’s easel supported a six-foot canvas, and the painter stood before it, blocking in his drawing in charcoal. He wore an overall of vivid butcher’s blue which made his pale face, with its sharply hewn profile, paler still. The face was heavily lined, the eyes set deep in their sockets, their shadows intensified by the strong light. Painter and sitter, both illuminated by the same set of lights, made one composition of startling primary colour, challenging and arresting.

  At the farther end of the fifty-foot studio, separated from the painter and his model by the shadows which claimed the greater part of the floor-space, was another group, lower-toned, yet still of pictorial value.

  Close to the stove, lighted by an electric bulb hanging immediately over their heads, two men sat on either side of a chess-board. One—the younger of the two—was a tawny-haired fellow, whose hair shone under the light. He had taken off his tweed coat and sat in a Fair Isle pull-over of green and russet and ochre, his long legs clad in brown corduroy slacks. His opponent at the chess-board was an older man, white-haired, dressed in a conventional dark lounge suit. Both men sat with their elbows on the table, their chins on their hands, utterly concentrated on their game. The beam of light which was directed down on them was shaded so that its rays did not reach the rest of the studio: the smoke from their pipes coiled up in blue wreaths, and the two players, with the board between them, achieved a sort of pattern whose composition was so precise that it seemed the result of deliberation rather than chance.

  For the greater part, silence reigned in the studio. The chess players had been intent on their game for a full hour, and an occasional low-spoken “check” came from one or the other, and then a long pause as each considered the next move. Robert Cavenish, the older of the two players, sat almost immobile, a frown of concentration furrowing his fine brow as he brooded over the pieces. Ian Mackellon, tawny-headed, long-limbed, spare, a typical Scot, moved his long legs occasionally as though he were cramped at the table, and sometimes he cast a glance at the vivid robes of the Cardinal on the model’s platform. There was the glint of a smile in his deep-set blue eyes, light under their heavy brows, as though the game were going well for him, and his eyes moved back to the board with a half-smiling concentration.

  At the farther end of the studio, Bruce Manaton stood at his canvas, drawing with a sort of savage determination, as much wrapped up in his task as were the chess players. Occasionally he uttered a curt admonition to his sitter, when the latter changed his pose a little as he tired.

  “Chin up, chin up—to the right a little—” the low-toned, rather irritable voice punctuated the silence as did the chess players with their monotonous challenge, and the Cardinal would raise his head and recover his poise, still with the same expression of gloomy haughtiness. André Delaunier—he who was clad in the Cardinal’s scarlet—was an actor by profession, well accustomed to posing, but he demanded a rest occasionally. Once, during the first hour of the chess players’ game, he had stood up impatiently, heedless of Manaton’s irritation, and had stalked majestically across the intervening gloom to stand behind the players and to con the board, while he stretched out his shapely white hands to the stove, to catch its warmth. The month was January, the temperature outside below freezing point, and the acrid London fog seeped in to the studio, a faint sulphurous reminder of the grimy blanket which enwrapped the whole Thames basin in noxious stillness.

  As Delaunier stood considering the board, neither player acknowledged his presence by word or movement, and the actor stood with a derisive smile on his lips as he observed the trap Mackellon was contriving for the older player. Manaton’s brusque voice recalled him.

  “Either you’re posing or else you’re playing chess,” he said. “You can’t do both.”

  “Damn you, for the devil’s own slave-driver,” retorted Delaunier. “If I can’t move occasionally I shall just coagulate into a lump. All right, all right—don’t lose your wool,” he concluded good-temperedly, as Manaton threw down his charcoal with an irritable gesture. Delaunier strode back silently across the studio, only the swish of his heavy robes making his passage audible, and he sat down again in the high-backed chair, resuming his former pose with the skill of the actor who donned his part as easily as he donned a garment.

  Neither of the chess players had moved or spoken during the sitter’s interlude. Cavenish showed by a deepening of the furrow between his brows that he was ignoring the interruption by a conscious effort, but Mackellon, his half smiling eyes on the chess-board, seemed aware of nothing but the ivory and ebony pieces of the game.

  “Check,” he said again.

  II

  During the course of the sitting Rosanne Manaton occasionally looked in at the studio from the door which led into the kitchen. The latter was a small room built as a lean-to against the studio wall. In size, the “kitchen” was spacious in comparison with the kitchenettes to be found in most small modern flats, but Rosanne, who was a fastidious creature, had looked at the domestic offices of the studio with unconcealed disgust when she had first seen the place. The “kitchen” was also the bathroom, and when Rosanne and Bruce Manaton had inspected the property with a view to renting it, the “k & b,” as Rosanne called it, had nearly overcome her determination to get settled at any price into some quarters which she and her brother could call their own. The scabrous peeling walls, the rusty bath and the beetle-infested floor had filled her with loathing.

  “It’s ghastly, Bruce,” she had said.

  “Oh—what matter? We can soon clean it up. It’s the studio that matters, and that’s damn good,” he had replied.

  It was Rosanne, of course, who had done the cleaning. The Manatons had had no money to spare for decorators. They oscillated between two initialled states—“B” and “A.B,” “Broke” and “Absolutely Broke.” Rosanne was an etcher and wood engraver, and her sensitive imaginative work had had some financial success in peace time: since the war her earnings, and those of her brother, had contracted to negligible amounts. The rather derelict studio in Hampstead had had cheapness to commend it, and Rosanne was always prepared to make the best of her surroundings. It was she who had first scrubbed down and later distempered the kitchen walls, re-enamelled the bath and sand-papered the rusty gas stove. She was still in process of redecorating the studio, intolerant of its dirt and dreariness. Bruce just shrugged his shoulders and left her to it. Grimy walls troubled him not at all. “I’ve seen worse in Paris,” was his only comment.

  Rosanne, standing looking at the studio and its occupants, was intensely aware of the decorative quality of both of the groups in it on that foggy winter evening. She did not often paint herself now: line work was her medium, but she felt an impulse to indulge in a modern composition in which both chess players, painter, and sitter should form a pattern, irrespective of distances and planes. With one hand on her hip, the other resting against the edge of the door, Rosanne Manaton herself achieved something in the way of a design, though she was all unconscious of it. Tall, lithe, da
rk haired, clad in an old ski-ing costume which she had put on for its cold-resisting qualities, Rosanne was an unusual figure. The costume suited her long slender body. Very few women past the age of thirty look well in trousers, but the black ski-suit, with a vivid scarlet scarf at the neck, became Rosanne’s long-limbed slenderness, as her close-cropped black hair became her shapely head. Beautiful she was not, but she had a quality best described by the word grace. Every movement of body or limbs, hands or feet, had the same characteristic of beautiful balance and efficiency. She moved purposefully, with an economy of effort in which no movement was redundant.

  As she stood looking at the studio, brooding over its pictorial possibilities, her brother turned irritably from his canvas and called to her:

  “For God’s sake either come inside or go right out, and shut that damned door. It’s draughty enough in here anyway—and I don’t want a cross light.”

  Rosanne withdrew into the kitchen and closed the door behind her. She was used to her brother’s irritable and often mannerless ways, and ignored his captiousness. Bruce was always at his most disagreeable when he was working.

  Rosanne returned to her cooking. She had undertaken to produce supper for five people at nine o’clock. The chess players and Delaunier had each provided a ration of something “to put into the pot,” and Rosanne was contriving a savoury stew from the miscellaneous collection brought in by the others, added to the meat and vegetables she had bought for herself. Actually she loathed cooking, but with the rare common sense which characterised her, she had taught herself to cook, and to cook well, in order to prevent Bruce squandering their slender means on restaurant meals. Rosanne, side by side with her natural artistry, had a sense of orderliness which made her intolerant of what she called “money messes.” She did not resent poverty so much, but she could not bear the squalor of indebtedness and constant borrowing which seemed to come so naturally to her brother.

  As she stood by the gas cooker, studying her simmering pot, someone knocked on the door which opened from the kitchen into the sooty garden in which the studio building stood. Rosanne pulled down a shade over the bare electric bulb before she opened the door. Black-out regulations were a nightmare to her, because her impatient brother was always forgetting them, and the probability of being fined always hung over their heads.